“I’m ready for more of the same,” he says, pulling her back to him. She nearly allows it, how can she not when it’s what she’s wanted for so long? But somehow she finds the strength within herself to raise her right hand and flatten her palm to his chest.

“Later,” she promises, before turning and pushing the door open. “I think you’re going to want to see this.” She doesn’t have to look back to know he’s following. She can sense a change in the air and in the dynamic between them. It's as if her seemingly nonchalant choice of right, of yes, has impressed him. Impressed him enough to allow her some small measure of control. He’s willing to let her take the lead; the kiss was his concession. But not his capitulation - This is only an experiment, if she screws up, she’s out of chances. This, she knows.

“What is this place?” he asks.

“You’ll see.”

His long legs allow him to quickly catch up to her and he rests his left hand low on her back, hooking his thumb through her belt loop, his fingers brushing lower. She smiles to herself at his sudden willingness to touch her. She imagines his hand in the same place, but without the thin material of her pants to separate them and she feels the heat once again threatening to overtake her.

They are getting closer to their destination. There are more and more people, passing them in both directions, and the noise level increases with every step they take.

“It’s just through there,” she says, gesturing towards the double doors at the end of the corridor. He drops his hand from her back and in two long strides, he’s at the door and pushing it open. He enters without waiting for her to catch up and she can hear him whistle, long and low, at the sight in front of him.

House surveys the room, and then his eyes come to rest on Cameron’s smug face. “This is so not the carnival,” he remarks dryly.

They are in a spacious but dimly lit room that has been converted into a theater. A platform made from crude plywood serves as the stage, and battered, stained folding chairs outline a lopsided aisle down the center. Some people stand around, talking quietly amongst themselves, while others perch uncomfortably on their seats. A couple squeezes around House and Cameron, who are still blocking the entrance, and gives them a curious stare.

If House is to guess, they have arrived either during the intermission or just in time for the beginning of the program. He hopes it’s neither. He hopes they’ve missed the god-awful show altogether.

Cameron supplies him with an answer. “Oh good. We’re in time to see the second act.”

“Like hell we are.” House is on the verge of yelling, whatever romantic inclinations he might have had swept away by his impatience and annoyance. “What are we doing here?”

“I promised my cousin Maggie that I would come see her perform if I wasn’t too busy.” She provides two tickets as physical proof. “I didn’t think you’d want to see it, or I would’ve brought it up sooner.”

House fixes her with an incredulous look. “Of all the places you could have taken me—a strip club, your place, a strip club, some seedy bar, a strip club—you choose a backwaters theater?”

“Yes.”

Her “yes” says it all. It lets him know that she’s still in charge and still expects him to enjoy whatever madness she thrusts upon him. It’s strangely a turn-on.

“We’ll leave as soon as it’s over,” she promises. “I won’t make you meet Maggie or do anything remotely sociable.”

He grunts his assent, and they make their way to two vacant chairs. House wriggles around, trying to find a comfortable spot, but the chairs weren’t made for comfort. They were obviously designed to keep their occupants wide awake and peevish.

“What is this play, anyways?” he mutters.

Cameron’s grin is far too nefarious for his liking. “You’ll see.”

“Goodie. More surprises.”

The dim lights dim even further, if at all possible, and the second act begins. The play itself isn’t half bad—it’s one of Neil Simon’s early works—but the acting is horrendous. House finds himself snickering, not at the witty dialogue, but at the execution of the lines. The worst part is that no one, save Cameron and himself, seems to notice or care that the play is a complete desecration of Simon’s genius.

About twenty minutes into the show, House leans over until his lips are brushing her ear. “Cameron,” he whispers, “You are soooo going to pay for this.”

Cameron’s not quite sure what his punishment will entail, but she hopes it involves more of their earlier endeavors. “Make it good,” she murmurs in a dulcet tone. He does a double take, and noticing that her expression is sincere, grins in return.

Thirty minutes in, House reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone.

“What are you doing?” Cameron hisses, though she is secretly relieved at the interruption from the atrocious performance going on around her.

“You’ll see,” House whispers, a smirk adorning his scraggily features.

It is one of those phrases which with House always means "Danger! Do Not Push This Big Honking Red Button!" For that reason, Cameron leans over to look, only to be poked away by House.

House's phone lights up, and he sits back and waits. Sure enough, in about half a minute their section of the theater is treated to a 20-second clip of Call Me When You're Sober. The man behind House kicks his chair, earning a solid death glare in response.

"And now that I've thoroughly annoyed our part of the crowd, I think it's time to go."

"House! It's only ten minutes to intermission!"

"Which will make it harder for us to leave when it happens!" House whispers back, grasping her arm and dragging her out of her seat.

That line sets her radar off, but she knows better than to cause a commotion while they're leaving. She walks down the aisle toward the side door; going through it, she turns expecting to find him just behind her. Instead, all she sees is the door swinging shut soundlessly. She fumes, wondering just what kind of rabbit he's going to pull out of the hat now.

House quickly sneaks up behind the double doosr that leads into the little hall, that itself leads to the big commercial hall. It's all dark there. He hears Cameron approach by the furious thuds on the carpet. She pushes the doors and passes by. Before she can go through the second set of doors, House grabs her waist from the back, turns her around and pins her against the wall. He fiercefully rushes his hands up and down her blouse, riffling it out of her pants on the way, he sensually moves her leg around his own waist.

Cameron has no time to think about his bad leg. She's too busy being taunted by House's lips licking hers and kissing them repeatedly. It isn't until he grabs her butt and pushes her even more against the wall to not loose balance that she sighes. How often had she dreamt of House and herself against something. Of feeling the rush he gives her every time he looks deeply in her eyes. She craves him. His sweetness and his bitterness at the same time. She knows he has both. He hides one by the other, but he should know by now that she knows better. But this isn't good. This isn't how she wants it. Well at some point, but not for a first.

She slightly pushes him back. "Now believe me, this is my top fantasy, but I don't think we should be annoying the crowd inside here any more than you already have."She thought he'd tell her she was backing out. She thought he'd tell her how weak she was to not stop thinking for a moment. She thought of a lot of things, but what he says isn't any of what she had in mind.

"By top fantasy, you mean me, right? Because there is no way the wombat ever pulls this off."

The last time Cameron went to a carnival she was ten. She consumed an elephant ear, a small cloud of cotton candy, a bucket of popcorn, and several sodas. And then she rode the Witches Wheel, which spun her sideways and upside down and round and round with nothing but a few metal bars and momentum holding her in place. Her brother told her later that he could hear her laughing from the ground below for the entire ride. She only remembers feeling deliriously happy and a little bit sick all at the same time, wishing the ride could go on and on. The giant wheel stirred the air and made it flow over her body as if the wind was softly kissing her skin. If she could have, she would have peeled off her clothes so she could have that touch of wind on every part of her.

She rode it three more times after that, and then she ran out of tickets.

The feeling of House's hand holding hers is akin to that. She can only wonder what further skin to skin contact would be like; how much more intense the pleasure of feeling all of him on all of her without barriers. Anticipation builds, her stomach flips and loops around like the Witches Wheel, and her panties dampen further as her imaginations kicks into overdrive.

He releases her hand as they arrive at the car, and the loss is immediate. Ride over, she thinks. But only for now, she promises herself as she slides behind the steering wheel.

It’s all so similar, yet so different at the same time. Her grips on the steering wheel; his on the cane. She driving; he occupying the passenger’s seat. It’s happened before. Not so long ago. Recently.

And the road is familiar too.

But he feels like rolling back the carpet he just laid before. The odd-looking stop sign, crooked in a funny angle (at least it’s funny to him), which had stood on his right earlier, now waves at him from the left side of the road.

They’re going back.

He glances sideways, watching Cameron as she’s focusing her eyes on the tarmac. And he finds himself rectifying: They’re not going back; she’s driving them back.

To where? Well, he’s not the one sitting on the driver’s seat, is he? He’s just as oblivious as… As anyone who’s not sitting on the driver’s seat, that is.

At that, he frowns. She was quick just now and this, for now, for him, still counts as unexpected. Because there are tables he requires to fill once in a while. And there are the others, in which she is clustered. And she’s not supposed to be behind the wheel. There’s not supposed to be a carnival. There’s no need of a theater.

She’s not supposed to drive them back.

But they’re here anyway. And he’s figuring out still, staring at Cameron instead. It’s the blush on her cheek that gives her away, letting him know that she’s, after all, aware. And he likes to believe that this is why his eyes stay, tracing the lines of her nose. Mapping out the dull edges of her forehead. Circling the brunette waves.

But he doesn’t notice the ever slowing pace. He should; he knows he should. Yet he doesn’t. And before he realizes it, he has stopped. They have stopped.

And she’s quick again, meeting his eyes with a swift turn of her head. The short intake of his breath becomes an indication of his... Unripeness.

His townhouse stands mere feet from them and all that it implies. It would be easy to let her inside, into his home and his bed. God knows he wants that. It was what comes after that terrifies him because Cameron will never be a one night stand for him. The idea of letting her into his life, into him, was what kept him motionless in his car seat, hand poised, frozen, over the seat belt release. To cover his momentary indecision and to keep her from seeing things he isn’t quite ready to reveal yet, he turns to her in the driver’s seat, giving her the option of remaining in control of what is, for him, rapidly spinning into entropy. Even though he’d made the suggestion before and then had kissed her, some part of his mind had thought it to be a bit of a game, one where she’s the first to realise that they are going to cross an invisible boundary and pull back, leaving him smug and safe. That doesn’t seem to be happening.

“Bold move, Dr. Cameron. Some might even say aggressive. What if I’m not that kind of girl? This is our first date and you haven’t even bought me dinner. My mother taught me better than that because who’s going to buy the cow when I’m giving away the milk for free?”

She smiles back at him, looking calmer than she has a right to and, he suspects, seeing clear through him. Damn it, she needs to stop doing that.

“Which one of us is the cow in that particular scenario?” she asks, continuing without waiting for an answer. “Not that it matters because my mother taught me that if I want something, I should go after it.”

She leaves it there, the unspoken “and you’re what I want” hanging in the air and practically making the atmosphere crackle between them. All he can think about right now is kissing her.

He finally opens his seat belt, gets out of the car, leads her to his apartment, and opens the door. Once inside he turns to her, still eager to kiss her.

He's kissed her before. But this time neither of them has an ulterior motive. Her soft, sweet lips part at the slightest pressure from his tongue and allow it to dance with hers. He pulls her closer, and runs his large hands along the sides of her slender body.

He lifts one hand to deftly open the buttons of her blouse. As his long fingers brush the thin fabric, he thinks about the robot he'd used to perform a similar task, but this time it's real. This time when she gasps as he touches the soft skin above the curve of her breasts, he can feel the warmth of her breath.

He smiles when he sees that her bra is similar to the one he'd imagined. He unhooks it to release the small but perfect breasts.

Her sighs of pleasure as he traces each nipple with a finger spur him on. He finds that the area around her naval is ticklish, so he moves lower, unbuttoning her slacks and slowly sliding the zipper down.

Cameron's hands aren't idle either. He pauses to let her pull his T-shirt over his head, to run her hands over his bare chest. Then he coaxes her slacks over her narrow hips, and she begins to open his jeans. They both know there's no turning back now. Whatever reservations either of them have had over the years have been discarded.

Once they've shed their clothes, they survey each other and are pleased with what they see. House reaches out a hand and leads Cameron to the bedroom, then pulls her close. As their bodies touch, their growing passion blocks out all rational thought.

Consequences be damned, there is only the two of them in this moment in time.They find themselves in the bed, urgently groping, passionately kissing, their only desire to become one. As they join at last, all the barriers between them disappear.

***

And now, here is my contribution to Round 3:

From behind closed eyelids, Cameron can sense the room the room getting brighter as the sun gradually ascends in the sky. She's not sleeping; in fact, she hasn’t slept at all. She's always had trouble sleeping in beds not her own. The pillows are never fluffy enough, or the blankets are scratchy, or the mattress has lumps in unfamiliar places. It's always something. This time, however, it's not a matter of being physically uncomfortable. Instead, it’s an emotional disquiet. Yesterday was, hands down, the most unusual day of her life. One of the best days, to be sure, but so improbable that she spent the hours since House fell asleep opening her eyes every fifteen minutes or so, just to verify that he was really there beside her.

Opening them yet again, she finds the room has lightened enough that she can see it clearly for the first time. It's just as she would have imagined his bedroom, had she ever done so - and of course, she had. Cluttered, but not unclean; masculine, but not in an off-putting way; it's a room she could come to feel very at home in.

There’s danger in that thought and she recognizes it immediately. It's unlikely that she'll ever spend enough time in this room to feel at home. In fact, it's doubtful that she'll ever see it again after she leaves it this morning. Yesterday was an anomaly. To expect it to be anything else is sheer folly.

If she were smart, she would creep out of bed right now, gather up every bit of evidence that she had ever been here, and slip right out the door and back into real life. Because this isn't real; she doesn't belong here. Staying too long, being here when he awakens, will shatter whatever magical spell had allowed yesterday to happen.

She doesn't want that. She wants to be able to tuck their time away in a treasure chest in her memory so she can pull it out whenever she has a difficult time with being just his employee. She wants to be able to remind herself that, for one day at least, she was so much more.

Looking over at the man sleeping peacefully beside her, she tries to memorize every detail of him – the way one arm is slung across his forehead, the dark hair curling across his bare chest, the sound of his even breathing. Eventually, regretfully, she pulls back the blankets and carefully so as not to awaken him, she slips out of the bed.